There were, it will be remembered, certain deeds in a sealed box left by the old Earl in the hands of Mr. Peter Naylor of New Inn. But they were duplicates. The originals had been left with Lord Howard of Escrick, the father of “My Robyn’s yonge Mrs.” and the uncle of Broghill’s wife, Lady Pegg. They embodied the old Earl’s last effort in family match-making; a fitting match for the youngest son of the great Earl of Cork, which would further unite the families of Cecil, Howard, and Boyle; already intermarried, as Broghill’s wife was a niece of Lord Edward Howard, Lady Salisbury his sister, and Lady Dungarvan’s mother a Cecil. The old Earl had done his very best for his Benjamin. And it is a mistake to suppose it probable that the children had never met. They may very well have made shy advances to one another during those weeks in the autumn of 1639 when Frank and Robyn were in London, just before Frank’s wedding. The House of the Savoy and Salisbury House were very near each other; the families were often together; and little Ann Howard—her mother dead—was often with Lady Salisbury. The two children may even have made a pretty and much-admired pair at Frank’s wedding in Whitehall, and hence may have come the old Earl’s confident “My Robyn’s yonge Mrs.” But there it had ended: the children, if they met then, had never seen each other since; and in five years they had both grown up. It was in 1642 that the old Earl commissioned Lady Pegg to carry to her little cousin the ring “besett rownd with diamonds”; but now it was 1645, and many things had happened. The vast Irish estates had been devastated in the Rebellion. Dorsetshire had been scourged by civil war; and Robyn had come back penniless and foreign-looking from Geneva, and was returning to his “ruined cottage in the country” to examine and administer his disordered affairs as best he could.

A boy of eighteen, Robert Boyle had come back heart-whole. Evelyn has left it on record that there were very few fair ladies in Geneva, when he and Captain Wray[128] and the poet Waller stopped there on their homeward journey, in 1646. “This towne,” wrote Evelyn, “is not much celebrated for beautifull women, for even at this distance from the Alps the gentlewomen have something full throats; but our Captain Wray ... fell so mightily in love with one of Mons. Saladine’s[129] daughters that with much persuasion he could not be persuaded to think on his journey into France.” Robert Boyle had not fallen in love with any of M. Saladine’s daughters; and his views on the subject of marriage would scarcely have been understood by Captain Wray. “Marriage,” wrote Robert Boyle from Stalbridge when he was scarcely twenty, “is not a bare present, but a legal exchange of hearts;—and the same contract that gives you right to another’s, ties you to look upon your own as another’s goods, and too surely made over to remain any longer in your gift.”

Curiously enough, “my Robyn’s yonge Mrs.” had already come, by an even shorter process of reasoning, to the same conclusion.

The Lady Ann Howard was a particular girl-friend of Anne Murray[130]—a daughter of that Murray who had been Provost of Eton before Sir Henry Wotton. Lady Ann Howard often stayed with the widowed Mrs. Murray and her daughter in their house in St. Martin’s Lane; and during the summer months of 1644 the two girls were constantly together at the house of Anne Murray’s elder sister, Lady Newton, at Charlton in Kent. It was a house surrounded by a garden with quiet walks in it. Lord Howard of Escrick’s eldest son, brother of “My Robyn’s yonge Mrs.,” was often there, for he was in love with Anne Murray; and Mr. Charles Howard—a young cousin of the Howards—was often there too, for he was in love with his cousin, Lady Ann. Anne Murray has left a pretty description of the love-making that went on in that garden. They called it amour in those days, and they were all ridiculously young. Lord Howard of Escrick, the father, was a Parliamentarian, and at this time very busy as one of the ten Lords who were lay members of the Westminster Assembly; but he was not too busy to come and fetch away his son and daughter when he heard what was going on. The four young people had been very happy in that garden. Anne Murray has described how once Charles Howard took his fair cousin by the hand, and “led her into another walke, and left him and I together.” “Him” was Lord Howard of Escrick’s son and heir, who straightway proposed to “I.” But Anne Murray was not allowed to say “yes”; her mother shut her up, and she was fed on bread and water. With the Lady Ann and Charles Howard it was quite different. The boy-cousin can have had no reason to conceal his feelings, unless indeed it were the prior claim of the absent Robyn. Charles Howard’s brilliant career may be read in any Peerage. He was a soldier and a man of parts at sixteen. He was to serve Cromwell and to become one of Cromwell’s Lords, and to be created Earl of Carlisle at the coronation of Charles II. He was the “finest gentleman”; and he won his cousin Ann, who was “My Robyn’s yonge Mrs.”

Robert Boyle also seems to have acted his part as became “a very parfit gentle knight” and the old Earl’s Benjamin. There can be little doubt that a passage in an undated letter from Lady Ranelagh to her brother belongs to this period, and ends, for him, the episode. “You are now,” she says, “very near the hour wherein your mistress is, by giving herself to another, to set you at liberty from all the appearances you have put on of being a lover; which, though they cost you some pains and use of art, were easier, because they were but appearances.”[131]

The Howard cousins, Mr. Charles Howard and the Lady Ann, must have been married very shortly after, if not before, Robert Boyle returned from his flying visit to France at the end of 1645. The box of deeds left with Lord Howard of Escrick must have come back into Robyn’s hands. The little lady was to pass out of his life almost before she can be said to have entered it. Twenty years afterwards the Lady Ann was still a young woman, though she was the mother of grown-up children, when Mr. Pepys made the entry in his diary: “I to church: and in our pew there sat a great lady, whom I afterwards understood to be my Lady Carlisle, a very fine woman indeed in person.”

CHAPTER IX
THE DEARE SQUIRE

“... When a Navigator suddenly spies an unknown Vessel afar off, before he has hail’d her, he can scarcely, if at all, conclude what he shall learn by her, and he may from a Ship that he finds perhaps on some remoter coast of Africa, or the Indies, meet with Informations concerning his own Country and affairs; And thus sometimes a little Flower may point us to the Sun, and by casting our eyes down to our feet, we may in the water see those Stars that shine in the Firmament or highest visible Heaven.”—Robert Boyle: Occasional Reflections on Several Subjects.

It was in March 1646 that Robert Boyle once more set out from London to ride into Dorsetshire. The Manor of Stalbridge was to be his home for the next five or six years.